RIP, Microsoft Paint. MS Paint, the first app you used for editing images, will probably be killed off in future updates of Windows 1. Paint 3. D. Microsoft lists the 3. Windows 1. 0s next autumn update, a little X marking the end of an era. The app is certainly a relic, from a time when the casual computer user couldnt crack open Photoshop or Skitch or Pixelmator or thousands of web apps. MS Paint cant save image components as layers or vectors its for making flat static images only. It doesnt smooth lines or guess at your best intentions. It does what you tell it and nothing more, faithfully representing the herky jerky motion of drawing freehand with a computer mouse. Its from a time before touch, a time before trackpads. As more sophisticated options appeared, Paints janky aesthetic became a conscious choice. Paint became the metonym for that aesthetic, even if an image was actually created in another app. TV Tropes lists major limitations that came to define a certain look the wobbly freehand lines, awkward color handling, and inappropriate export settings that give Paint its distinctive look. In 2. 01. 4, Gawkers Sam Biddle noted Paints influence on conspiracy theory images, calling the form Chart Brut. In amateur detectives attempts at identifying the Boston Marathon bombers, the simplicity and jaggedness of Paint evokes the crazy wall aesthetic of red string and scribbled notes, apparently without irony. The same year, internet historian Patrick Davison explored Paints influence on the last decade of meme culture, particularly Rage Comics. Boxee was a crossplatform freeware HTPC Home Theater PC software application with a 10foot user interface and social networking features designed for the living. Well, I wont be customizing my current PS4 controllers. Those are going in a box. Im coating old Xbox 360 controllers in Sugru, making sure they can stand up to. Developers XBMC Foundation Initial release 2002 as Xbox Media Player, 2003 as Xbox Media Center Stable release. The outsider art aesthetic feels appropriate to the relatable everyday content, and makes the art form unthreatening. Of course, Paint offered a few features to smooth things out, like the circle and line tools and the fill tool, all used in the stoner comics of the early 1. Crucially, those circles still had jagged curves. The bright colors of stoner comics are flat, as MS Paint didnt support gradients without an elaborate hack. Contrast those pixellated lines with the slick, stylish face from this art tutorial This slickness is built into Paints successor, Paint 3. D. From the moment you start sketching, Paint 3. D smooths out your art. It also supports automatic selection tools and content aware fill to rival Photoshops. By automatically improving art, Paint 3. D hides the process behind the image. Paints sloppiness is probably why rage comics got so popular. Looking at a rage comic, you can tell exactly how it was drawn, and how you might draw one yourself. By delivering exactly what the artist draws, MS Paint forms an image that the viewer can mentally reverse engineer and imitate. Unless you go absolutely nuts with it. Reddit user Toweringhorizon painstakingly assembled the drawing To a Little Radio using MS Paint tools like the oil brush, stretching the medium while maintaining a pixelated look. Its one of the top submissions to MS Paint subreddit, a beautiful collaborative art gallery. Scrolling through this art feels like flipping through the sketchbook of the most artistic kid in high school. Theres an accepted roughness, a desired minimalism. For example, the exquisite raindrops in the work above are reflected in a flat, featureless tabletop. Like a transistor radio, Paint might be showing its age, but this tenacious little gadget should not be underestimated. To a Little Radio doesnt even come close to testing Paints limits. As we say goodbye to the app that shaped an era, let us watch this bizarrely soundtracked time lapse of drawing Santa Claus in MS Paint on Windows 7 over the course of 5. We can only believe this is real because faking it would be even harder. Boxee Wikipedia. For other uses, see Boxy. Boxee was a cross platformfreeware. HTPC Home Theater PCsoftware application with a 1. TV that enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social network services and interactive media related features. Boxee was originally a fork of the free and open source. XBMC now Kodi media center software which Boxee used as an application framework for its GUI and media player core platform, together with some custom and proprietary additions. 12345679Marketed as the first ever Social Media Center,1. Boxee was made available on 1. June 2. 00. 8. 1. The UI design of the Alpha prototype was designed with design firm Method Incorporated, who also created Boxees brand identity. 1. The first public beta version was officially released for all previously supported platforms on 7 January 2. Boxee gained the ability to watch live TV on the Boxee Box using a live TV stick in January 2. By the end of 2. 01. Boxee co developed a dedicated set top box hardware called Boxee Box by D Link in cooperation with D Link which was the first Powered by Boxee branded device to be announced and launched,1. Iomega TV with Boxee available in the UK Europe in cooperation with Iomega2. View. Sonic with integrated Boxee software. Boxee was owned and developed by a single for profit startup company, Boxee, Inc., which began as a high techstealth startup based in Israel and the United States with seed money from several angel investors, was then known to be financially backed by venture capital firms such as General Catalyst Partners, Union Square Ventures, Softbank, Pitango, Spark Capital and Globis Capital Partners. 2. The companys main offices are located at 1. West 2. 6th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 1. Coordinates 4. 04. N7. 35. 93. 3W 4. N 7. 3. 9. 92. 61. W 4. 0. 7. 45. On Wednesday, July 3, 2. Samsung would hire key employees and purchase Boxees assets for around 3. M. Samsung confirmed the acquisition with The New York Times, but did not disclose the amount. 2. OvervieweditBoxee supports a wide range of popularly used multimedia formats, and it includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third party plugins. As a media center, Boxee can play most audio and video file containers, as well as display images from many sources, including CDDVD ROM drives, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares. 2. Through the processing power of modern PC hardware, Boxee is able to decode high definition video up to 1. Boxee is able to use DXVA Direct. X Video Acceleration on Windows Vista and newer Microsoft operating systems to utilize GPU accelerated video decoding to assist with process of video decoding of high definition videos. 3. With its Python powered plugin system, the Boxee software incorporates features such as Apple movie trailer support and subtitle downloading, access to large on demandvideo streaming services Netflix, Headweb and Vudu a range of popular online internet content channels like audio services Pandora Radio, Last. Jamendo, NPR, SHOUTcast radio streams video services from ABC, BBC i. Player, Blip. TV, CNET, CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, Funny or Die, Joost, Major League Baseball, NHL Hockey, MTV Music, My. Space. TV, Revision. MUBI, Open. Film, Snag. Films, Indie. Movies. Online, EZTakes, United Football League, Vevo, Vice Magazine, TED, The WB Television Network, You. Tube3. 33. 4 and image services from Flickr and Picasa. Web picture viewing plugins. All are available as media sources available alongside the local library. Some of the services are via specialized connections e. You. Tube, while the rest are a preselected list of podcast channels for streaming using generic RSS web feeds e. BBC News. 2. 9 Boxee also supported NBC Universals Hulu quite early on, but in February 2. Hulu to remove the service at the request of Hulus content partners. 3. Boxee later reinstated the feature using Hulus RSS feeds,3. Hulu once again blocked access. 3. Even though both the Boxee App and the Boxee Box support Netflix,3. Boxee App supports only a limited instant queue, missing more recent TV shows and movies available through the web browser and i. Phone apps. Boxee recently introduced a new plugin architecture based on the XUL XULRunner framework which technically allows any web based application to be ported into an application for Boxee integration. Because of this Boxee can now utilise Mozilla corebase architecture for most of its plugins since this is the same core architecture that Firefox uses, Hulu will see Boxee as any other Mozilla browser so Hulu doesnt block the app. 4. Hulus latest attempt to thwart Boxee involves Java. Script scrambling. 4. Another interesting aspect is how Boxee manages to play Adobe Flash content from sites such as You. Tube and Hulu, and display HTML5 or Silverlight content from such web based services such as HBO Go and Netflix. Boxee seems to be shipping with a closed source, binary only, program called bxflplayer, which seems to load Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight proprietary plugins. This program communicates with the main Boxee process via shared memory and it renders the video onto screen. By using this approach, it is possible for Boxee not only to play Flash Video and Silverlight content that is protected by DRM Digital Rights Management but also allows for the user to control the player using a remote control and other input devices that are more suitable to laid back watching. Same as with the above mentioned libboxee, it is not clear if this way of using bxflplayer as closed source libraries with a GPL licensed software passes as GPL linking exception or not. 3. Boxee source code is otherwise in majority based on the XBMC now Kodi media center projects source code which Boxee uses as its software framework, and the Boxee developers contribute changes to that part back upstream to the XBMC project. 4. So Boxee is partially open source and those parts are distributed under the GNU General Public License, however Boxees social networking layer library, libboxee is closed source as it deals with proprietary methods of communication with Boxees online back end server which handles the user account information and social network communications between the users in the Boxee userbase, it is not clear if this way of using closed source libraries with a GPL licensed software passes the GPL linking exception or not. 4. FeatureseditSocial Networking LayerseditThe social networking component of Boxee is the differentiator from other media center software. Boxee requires registered user accounts, which form a social network of fellow Boxee users. Users can follow the activity of other Boxee users who were added as friends, and can publicly rate and recommend content. Users can also control what media appear in the activity feed in order to maintain privacy. If a user recommends something that is freely available from an internet content service then Boxee will let others users stream it directly. If a user recommends something that is not freely available then Boxee will try to show metadata, and movie trailers if it is a movie that the user recommend. 2. The users friends Boxee activity feeds are displayed on the users home screen, as is the users own recent activity. Internet content is accessed through a sub menu of each of the video, audio, and photo menu items, such as Video My videos and Video Internet videos. 2. In addition Boxee Beta and later has the option of monitoring Twitter and Facebook news feeds to automatically discover links to videos, Boxee will then add those videos to a watch queue in Boxee so they can be later viewed. Boxee can also export a users media activity feed to other social networking services such as Friend. Feed, Twitter, and Tumblr. The list of connections to such supported third party social networking services is currently small, and this feature is one way only, it is for example not yet possible to monitor Twitter feeds from within Boxee, but this type of third party integration is different from the way content sources are treated.
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